


I will not substitute accuracy with enthusiasm

by mercurybard



Category: Changeling: the Dreaming, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines (Video Game), Werewolf: The Apocalypse, World of Darkness (Games)
Genre: Dragon Age References, Gen, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-31
Updated: 2015-09-07
Packaged: 2018-04-18 05:28:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4693796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mercurybard/pseuds/mercurybard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eavesdropping and a little B&E are all in a night's work for a dhampir courier and her corax bestie</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

“This is bullshit!”

Trust Nines to be the only one with enough stones to state the obvious. Dani fished a cherry-flavored cough drop out of her messenger bag and scooted a little closer to the edge of the catwalk. From here, she could bounce the wadded up wrapper right off the bald head of Gary, the Nosferatu primogen. He’d be annoyed, yes, but it wasn’t like he didn’t know she and Ellen were up here, spying on LaCroix’s little court proceedings. M1tn1ck had been the one to send her up here to install the web cam, and M1tn1ck was one of Gary’s.

The order of business tonight: a vampire who’d Embraced someone without first begging LaCroix’s permission. The sire had already been dispatched by the Sheriff and was now nothing more than ash floating on the AC currents. Now, there was the matter of the illegitimate childe, so to speak. From the way the prince had been ranting, he’d fully intended to execute the newly-Embraced too, but Nines might have just put a halt on that.

The raven beside Dani on the catwalk shook its head and blurred. Ellen Arrow’s homid form settled cross-legged beside Dani with a slight “whumph” of air.

Dani glared. Way to be more obvious, Ellen. So far, none of the Kindred below had acknowledged their presence up here, but two teenage girls were harder to ignore than one girl and a bird.

“I can’t properly express the things I want to do to that man when I’m in corvid.” Ellen leaned down and whispered in Dani’s ear. Her long, straight brown hair tickled the side of Dani’s face. She’d changed back into the same clothes she’d been wearing when the evening started—a baggy pink house dress and ratty red sweater. Barefoot, as usual. Dani carried a pair of ballet slippers in her bag, just in case they had to go somewhere that shoes were required and birds forbidden.

“What happened to the corvid tongue being the most nuanced language in existence?” Dani hissed back.

Below them, LaCroix was backpedaling on the whole ‘kill the bastard childe’ issue. The man might be a stuck-up asshole Ventrue, but he wasn’t stupid. Nines Rodriguez was the unofficial leader of LA’s anarchs, and not too long ago, California had been an Anarch Free State. Nines was strong, passionate, and—as Ellen loved to point out—damn good looking. There were plenty of people who’d back Nines if he chose to throw down with the prince.

Speaking of Ellen’s pointless little crush. “Seems silly thinking about licking someone when you’ve got a beak.”

And there was a mental picture Dani could have done without. “Oh, shut up.”

Seems LaCroix was going to let Los Angeles’ newest Kindred live, though his ‘compassion’ was as transparent as cling wrap. At least, though, court was wrapping up. She and Ellen hadn’t actually meant to be caught up here on the Nocturne Theater’s catwalk as vampire policy was debated below…that had just been a stroke of good fortune. Idly, Dani wondered if any of the power players in LA (the non-vampiric ones, since the Who’s Who of Kindred was currently filing out of the theater below) would pay for a blow-by-blow of Nines and LaCroix’s little confrontation. Or the identity of the prince’s newest pawn. “What do you think?” she asked, turning to Ellen.

The Corax, no longer needing to gross out of her best friend and business partner with tales of tongues, had reverted back to bird form. “I say we go find you a cab unless you want to hoof it all the way out to Hollywood,” Ellen replied in her native tongue. She hopped to the edge of the catwalk and looked down. “Ooh! Shiny!” And then she was gone.

Dani sighed. “Bird brain.” After double-checking one last time that the web cam was secure and hooked up properly, she followed the walkway backstage and then scrambled down the ladders to the stage floor. The Camarilla goon squad was long gone, following in the wake of their prince. Now, it was just her and a shapeshifting raven with an addiction to sparklies.

Ellen swooped low overhead, and Dani’s hand shot out reflexively to catch the small item she’d dropped. It was an earring—a heart-shaped ruby surrounded by tiny diamonds. “These real?” she asked. If they were, they could always pawn it, though they wouldn’t get much without the other one.

Ellen shrugged, a very human gesture that looked weird coming from a bird.

“Ack,” she muttered, dropping the earring into her bag where it was sure to get lost in the darkness. “Let’s go find that cab.”

***

There was one, not surprisingly, parked across the street from LaCroix’s tower. Despite the late hour—3am according to Dani’s cheap digital watch—the driver was wearing sunglasses.

“Hey, Pops,” she greeted him, leaning her forearms on the driver’s door. “You got the meter running?”

The driver bared his fangs. “How many times have I told you not to call me ‘Pops’.”

“You rather I switch to ‘Granddad’? ‘Cause that might be more accurate.”

The cabbie just scowled and jerked his thumb toward the backseat, indicating they should either get in or get the fuck away.

“Ah, no need to be cross,” Ellen teased in bird-tongue. “There are so many worse things she could call you—like your real name. Wouldn’t LaCroix just shit if he knew the father of all vampires drove a Yellow Cab?” The driver, of course, couldn’t understand a damn word she was saying. At least, Dani assumed he didn’t. He’d banned Ellen from speaking English in his presence months back when she’d drank the eyes of the previous Toreador primogen and learned the truth. (Caine had pulled the eyeballs from the still-living primogen’s head as punishment for what he had seen and then left them lying carelessly where a certain nosey Corax could get to them.)

The driver glared at them in the rearview mirror. “Where to?”

“The Red Spot, in Hollywood,” Dani named a centrally located convenience store where you could buy Slurpees and stock up on shotgun ammo. Not that she needed shotgun shells—guns weren’t really her thing—but it was interesting to see just who came up to the counter and told the clerk “special me”. Of course, if you wanted the real heavy duty stuff—assault rifles, etc—then you either had to make nice with LaCroix’s ghoul, Mercutio, out in Santa Monica or go all the way down to Tseng’s in Chinatown.

“Ooh, you think we could get Slurpees?” Ellen squawked. “I want a cherry one. Maybe a white cherry. We’d only have to get one—the straws are long enough that I can sit on your shoulder and still reach. And people wouldn’t think it was weird having a bird drinking a Slurpee, just funny…”

The driver turned the radio up, and Dani settled back against the plastic-y seat cover, only half listening to Ellen and the DJ, Deb of Night.

M1tn1ck had hired them for three nights to help him expand the Nosferatu network a.k.a. “schrecknet” throughout the city. Something was putting the Kindred (especially the older ones) on-edge, he’d explained, and the Sewer Rats were circling the wagons, so to speak. She and Ellen had started their night in an abandoned computer repair shop in Santa Monica before stopping in at the theater and getting caught up in the court. They had time—maybe—to complete the hookup at the Heavy Metal Industries warehouse in Hollywood before the sun came up and LA’s streets filled with ignorant mortals.

Both Dani and Ellen could operate during the day—the Corax was blessed by Helios after all, and Dani was only half-vampire—but surely there were mortals who worked at Heavy Metal during the day, carrying on the charade that it was a legitimate business. Besides, they’d been guaranteed three nights’ worth of work. No reason to be too efficient.

“Let’s just scope the place and come back tomorrow,” she murmured as the lights whizzed by outside her window.

Ellen was perched on the headrest of the passenger seat in front of her, head flicking back and forth between Dani and the driver so often she was going to get whiplash. “You getting sleepy, youngin’.”

If there was one thing Ellen wouldn’t let her forget, it was that Dani looked thirteen or fourteen. She was actually almost seventeen, but the rate she aged at had slowed to a crawl when she’d hit puberty. (The ID in her bag said ‘nineteen’, and since it was a legal California driver’s license helpfully provided by the baron of Hollywood in return for a job well done, no cop could argue otherwise.) Ellen, in comparison, was a worldly-wise eighteen.  


“Nah, but I kinda want to just…hang out.”

“If you wanted to hang, why couldn’t we do it at the Last Round.” Of a raven could pout, Ellen was.

“You just want an excuse to oogle Nines.” The Last Round was an infamous anarch hangout. A rough place, but they’d both been in there a couple of times. Working, of course. Everybody in Los Angeles’ nighttime populace knew about Grout’s “ghoul” and her wereraven friend. They ran messages and errands for vampires and weres of every stripe. Except Sabbat. The shovel-heads had heard one too many rumors about Dani’s parentage, and she had no desire to get axed because they saw her as some omen of the Apocalypse. Being the underworld’s courier was far from a position of respect, but she at least had friends who would notice if she went missing. “We could go down to the Warrens and challenge M1tn1ck to a couple rounds of Counter Strike.”

“What you consider fun still amazes me. Besides, we’re supposed to be working for him. I’m sure he’d appreciate it if we stopped by for an impromptu LAN party on the clock. We could go to Vesuvius.”

“Are you horny or something? First Nines and now strippers.”

“Ah, Dani, you know you’re the only girl for me.” Ellen hopped from the headrest to Dani’s shoulder and plucked at her jacket’s lapel.

The cab screeched to a halt in front of the Red Spot. “Out,” Caine barked.

He hadn’t, Dani noticed, run the meter. She was still trying to wrap her head around why he hadn’t ended them the way he ended Nastazia, the late Toreador primogen, when they discovered his secret. At first, she’d assumed he found her half-vampire status amusing, but that didn’t explain the free cab rides.

“Thanks,” she said as she slid across the seat, Ellen’s claws digging into the thick fabric of her coat. A couple of gangbangers idled near the pay phones in one corner of the lot, eyeing the teenage girl with the bird on her shoulder warily. She slid a hand into the pocket of her jacket, fingers finding and wrapping around her switchblade, but none of them did more than stare as she crossed the street, heading towards the warehouse. 

The place was stitched up tight, but she had a keycard in her pocket. Ellen alighted as Dani paused casually near the door, digging through her messenger bag like she’d lost something. Which, given the amount of Ellen’s shiny crap she toted around, wouldn’t surprise anyone.

A minute later, Ellen was back. “The place is full of goons with guns,” the Corax said quietly as she settled on Dani’s shoulder. “No way you’re going to be able to sneak past all of them and get up to the office without being seen. Not unless you’ve mastered one of those vampire tricks and forgotten to tell me about it.”

“No, I haven’t.” Not for want of trying. Her mother—the vampire who’d given birth to her—was Malkavian. A thin-blood, according to Grout, who ran the insane asylum where Dani’s mother was housed, which explained why she’d been able to give birth in her undead state, but a childe of Malkav nonetheless. There was a chance, a slim one, that if Mom hadn’t been off her gourd before her Embrace, that the Curse of Malkav wouldn’t have affected her mind at all.  
But Mom had spent most of her living life trapped in a dream world and the dreams had only grown more vivid in her undeath.

Vampires of her clan, though, could master the art of being unseen as well as heightening their perception, both of which would be awesome assets in Dani’s line of work. Unfortunately, Mom wasn’t able to do either, and no matter how much Dani spied on Grout and the other lower generation vampires, she couldn’t figure out how they did.

But she didn’t share any of this with Ellen.

“You want to take this one?” she asked the Corax on her shoulder. It was a warehouse with five loading docks just on this side of the building. Surely birds got trapped inside all the time.

“There’s a busted windowpane up there that isn’t boarded over. Give me five minutes.” And then she was gone, a blackbird quickly disappearing against the night sky.

“Show off,” Dani muttered. She slid further back into the shadows of the building to wait. The bars were just getting out, and drunken fools stumbled into the night, clutching at one another. Not for the first time, she marveled at the intoxicated women who tottered along on five inch spiked heels. She wouldn’t be able to make it out of the house—sober—without twisting her ankle. No, she’d stick to her massive stompy boots, thank you very much.

A whoosh of feathers in the dark, and Ellen hit the ground in homid form beside her. Dani automatically dug the ballet slippers out of her bag and passed them to the barefoot Corax. “You take care of it?”

“Piece of cake.” But she staggered a little as she pulled the first slipper on and had to put a hand on Dani’s shoulder for balance. Changing form too many times could take it out of her.

“Couldn’t type with your beak?”

“Couldn’t pick the lock on the office door. My lockpicks were in my other pants.” When she shifted from human to bird and back again, the small objects in her pockets went the same place her clothes did—someplace nobody knew but Ellen called ‘Hammerspace’ thanks to a youth spent watching too much anime.

“Wanna go get coffee?” Dani suggested. There was a little coffee shop behind the Chinese Theater down the street. Not that Ellen was allowed caffeine—it made her run her beak at ten times the normal speed. But there were fruity drinks too, and they knew one of the baristas, so if he was working, then he’d humor Ellen’s inevitable requests for bizarre off-the-menu concoctions.

“I wanna go to the Last Round,” she answered, pouting.

“Why? It’s not like we can drink, and you won’t actually talking to Nines if we go.” It was true—the only thing capable of shutting Ellen up was her ridic crush on Nines.

“We could tease Skelter.”

Right, because poking fun of the ‘Nam chopper pilot turned anarch vampire was such a good idea. “Or we could go get coffee.” Linking her arm through Ellen’s, Dani steered them out onto the sidewalk in the direction of the Chinese Theater.

The baron of Hollywood—the highest ranking anarch in vampire in LA—had his haven in the back of a jewelry store across the street. Dani spent most of her time running messages for him or for the Nosferatu. For all his honeyed words, LaCroix didn’t trust her. Most likely because she ran with a Corax, but there was always a chance that he suspected the veracity of her claim to be Grout’s ghoul.

After all, she wasn’t insane.

Yet, a little voice whispered in the back of her mind. Schizophrenia, the illness that had institutionalized her mother from age seventeen until her Embrace and then into her undeath, ran in families. There was a good chance Dani was…what was the word? Predisposed. 

“You’ve got your ‘thinking about Mom’ face on,” Ellen said quietly as they skirted the line of mortals hanging around outside the Asp Hole. “She doing okay?”

“As good as she ever does,” Dani replied, kicking at a crumpled beer can. “At least she recognized me this time and didn’t start screaming about my ‘impotent Demon’.”

Ellen managed to suppress her chuckle…almost. It came out as a giggle-snort combination.

Dani elbowed her.

“What?”

“It’s not that funny.”

“Your mother calling you ‘impotent’ will never not be funny.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So, I thought I was posting Chapter 1 for posterity, but apparently, I've fallen down the old World of Darkness hole again, so here's more.

After coffee, they ended up going back to the Nosferatu Warrens under Hollywood anyway. If M1tn1ck was put off seeing them when he'd dispatched them on a errand, he didn't say anything, just fired up Counter Strike. Even first person shooters could only hold his attention for so long--after about the eleventh round, the Nosferatu hacker received an email from a source and was off, fingers flying across the keyboard in a hunt for information. Dani, realizing playtime was over for the night, shut down her laptop and went wandering the Warren, leaving Ellen asleep on M1tn1ck's bed. The corax was diurnal by nature, and while she had trained her body and brain to stay awake and enjoy the nightlife, she still tended to fade in the small hours before dawn.

This deep in the Warrens, boards had been laid down to make rotted bridges over the worst pools of sewage. But things still squished under Dani's boots, thankfully unidentifiable in the dark. The chambers she sought were well off the beaten path though--down a dead end passage far away from the central hubbub. Instead of being decorated with neon signs or strings of Christmas lights, the only marker for this particular Nosferatu's home was a single tea light, its wick about to be drowned in melted wax, flickering inside an old-fashioned lantern. A doorknocker shaped like a gargoyle's head hung bolted to the center of the door, which looked like it had been scavenged from a shitty motel.

Dani knocked once, twice, and then stepped back so anyone looking through the peephole would have a clear view of her.

"Enter!" a voice rasped from within.

The door opened onto some of the nicest chambers in the Warren (at least those that Dani had been permitted to see) with brightly colored saris covering almost every inch of the rough-cut rock walls. Overhead, rainbow parachute fabric draped across the ceiling, making it feel like you were standing in a large circus tent. From a hole in the center dangled a chandelier. Once an '80's monstrosity of gleaming brass and fist-sized globes of glass around the candle-shaped bulbs, it had been spray painted black and the globes tinted blue and green and red. Over half the room was taken up by an enormous bed, tall enough that its owner needed a red plastic step stool to climb on to it, and mounded high with needlepoint throw pillows. Most were of traditional needlepoint subject matter: birds, flowers, etc. But there was one with the Apple logo and another that read 'Fuck You, You Fucking Fuck' near the top of the heap.

Across from the foot of the bed was a dressing table complete with tripartite mirrors re-purposed as a computer desk. The Nosferatu woman seated in front of the PC paused her game and looked over at Dani's entrance. "Ah, Dani Daydream. Grout's wandering ghoul has come to beard me in my den."

"Hi, Salome," Dani greeted her as she slid into an ergonomic desk chair that had been shoved aside in favor of the ancient green wing-back that the Nosferatu sat enthroned on.

Salome had a delicate, almost fragile appearance--all long bones and spider's leg fingers. She clothed herself in great swatches of material--a sari to start with and then a massive veil over that to hide the deformities of her figure. The ends of both garments trailed in the muck of the sewers and so were perpetually tattered and stained. She kept a headscarf on at all times, the ends pulled across her lower face, but Dani could see from her profile that her nose was missing. Her eyes above the silk were huge in her narrow face with cat-like pupils and an extra set of vertical eyelids that flickered constantly in the dim lighting.

"What are you playing?" Dani asked, gesturing to the monitor where a cute blond man in armor faced outwards at the player.

"Dragon Age," Salome answered, turning back to her game. "The first one, of course. The boys need to upgrade my system before it will run either of the sequels, but luckily, this one has such immense replay value...though I'm finding it damnably hard not to romance Alistair whenever I play as a woman."

Salome's shifting in the chair revealed a small child curled in her lap. For half a horrible second, Dani thought the little boy--who could be no more than two or three years old based on the size and the disposable diaper that covered his bum--was dead. But then she saw the rise and fall of his chest. "Where'd you get a baby?" Dani asked, a little dazed by the child's presence so deep in the Warrens. She didn't run across many children during her nightly work. Surely, Salome hadn't stole him to feed?

Salome smoothed a hand over the little boy's black curls. "They found him in the Antechamber, all alone. He's a faerie of some kind. Look,"--and she pulled back his upper lip to reveal pink gums--"No teeth. Gary brought him to me hoping I could identify what he is." Salome was the resident historian--the only Nosferatu in the Hollywood Warren who concerned herself with collecting information on the distant past instead of focusing on the here and now. "Unfortunately, all I know is he's one of the Good Folk. Odd little beastie when he's awake--doesn't cry, just mewls like a kitten. He's got such sad little eyes."

She sounded so motherly that Dani couldn't help but smile. "Have you given him a name?"

"Yusuf," Salome replied, "Though we'll call him 'Yussie' for now. Gary's postponed making any decisions regarding him until we see if someone comes looking for him."

"To get as far into the sewers as the Antechamber? Sounds like somebody dumped him where they figured he'd die before social services could find him."

"Maybe." Salome was quiet for a moment, stroking her hand over his bare back, careful of her talon-like nails. "Tell me, Dani Daydream, what news from the upstairs world of Prince LaCroix?"

Salome's, er, professional interests might have rested with history, but she still craved gossip as much as the next Nosferatu and just letting Dani into her room where she could see Yussie had created an information debt that good manners and common sense dictated Dani pay as soon as possible. "There's an ambassador from the prince of Chicago due in on the red-eye tomorrow night. LaCroix's being cagey, but I heard him making arrangements to have them picked up and brought back to the tower in a limo. I don't think he knows why they're coming."

"Interesting," Salome murmured. "What about you, little ghoul? Do you have a place to sleep away the day?"

Dani shook her head. "Grout's kicked me out of the mansion again." He did that every couple of months when having a living, breathing presence in his haven got to be too much for his deeply rooted sense of paranoia.

Salome's hand stilled on Yussie's back. "He does that quite frequently, does he not?"

Dani nodded and then tried to stifle a yawn.

"And he usually locks you out for days, even weeks at a time?"

Dani nodded again. She should probably get up and go back to M1tn1ck's room. Sleeping next to Ellen always meant resigning herself to being kicked...a lot, but she didn't feel awake enough to make it back to one of her above-ground boltholes safely.

"Tell me, Dani Daydream, how do you get by for such long stretches without consuming any of your master's vitae?"

And just like that--ambush. Suddenly, Dani didn't feel so sleepy after all as fear and adrenaline chased away the cloud of fatigue. Luckily, she and Ellen had planned for someone asking a question like this and prepared her story in advance. "I'm not much older than I look, so going without Grout's blood doesn't age me that much." She brought her thumb up to her mouth and started chewing on a loose hangnail in a calculatedly absent gesture. "I should probably go longer--at least age up to where I look legal, huh? But it gets bad being without for very long. I talked him into laying aside a couple of bags of blood for me, just in case, when he was in one of his more generous moods a while back. If things get real awful before he lets me come home, I can sip off those."

Salome's eyelids--both sets--blinked slowly as she looked Dani over, probably searching for body language to counteract the veracity of the tale Dani was spinning.

But Dani spent half her life lying to Malks with their freaky insight, and she knew she wasn't giving anything away.

"What a resourceful little ghoul you are," Salome finally said, and Dani felt something deep in her chest loosen in relief. "And exhausted too. Why don't you lie down on my bed and catch up on your sleep? It sounds like you will have a busy night tomorrow with the prince's unexpected guest arriving, and I have some very important questing to do--once I get these foolish dwarves to stop bickering long enough to honor their treaty, it's off to the Landsmeet."

"Thanks, Salome," Dani said as she eased herself out of the desk chair and burrowed into the mountain of tiny pillows without bothering to take her boots off. The sheets felt vaguely damp against her skin, though she tried to tell herself they were just cold, but the mattress was soft, and she soon nodded off.


End file.
